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Friday, 27 September 2013

Google celebrates its 15th birthday with an interactive piñata doodle

As Google turns 15, it is celebrating its birthday with an interactive piñata doodle. The doodle is a basic video game that challenges users to collect as many sweets as possible by whacking the piñata with a stick. The doodle also gives a glimpse of how the search engine page looked in 1998.

The company started as a University project in 1996 and then as a garage startup by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both PhD students at Stanford University, has today turned into an Internet powerhouse and has the most influential web presence. It was originally named BackRub, and thankfully, later re-christened Google. The company has come a long way from being just a Search engine, from Android mobile operating system to the latest Google Glass, we’ve seen it all. Take a look at the 15 Google milestones over the past 15 years. It is based in Mountain View, California, which is seven miles away from the house whose garage and bedroom was rented by Brin and Page.

To celebrate its 15th birthday, the company has also silently revamped its search engine algorithm to cope with increasing complex questions that are thrown at it by users from web and mobile devices. The new algorithm is called “Hummingbird” and was rolled out last month and reportedly more than 90 percent of Google’s worldwide searches are now handled by the new algorithm. It also improves Knowledge Graph with comparisons and filters, and adds cards and cross-platform notifications to mobile.

Though the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998, it has been celebrating its birthday on September 27 for the past few years.